Inside Out

Germany: You need to take the card, after that the machine will give you the money

China: Take your money and then tell the machine to give you the card

Because I’m German I might like the german concept better, but it both makes sense. If you loose your card in Germany you have to go trough a lot of bureaucracy in order to get the card back, so please make sure you have your card. In China you will get a new card within minutes (Yes of cause I forgot my card and had to test the prosedure) so better make sure you have your huge bundle of - hopefully not fake - 100 RMB notes with you.

Bottom line is: Yes, there is some sort of best practice, which can be really helpful but for your own unique case common sense and testing might work a lot better. China might sometimes be like Germany but you are better off to test…

Chinglish

The default behavior in symfony is that if an exception arises and is not handled then it will redirect the user to the error500.php page or show a stack trace. Even if is possible to override the error500.php page, we where in the need to provide custom messages to the user and also keep him inside the symfony application. 

Multiple factors can make this problem to happen, like when the database server refuse our connection attempts or just because something went wrong in our php application. To overcome this issue we developed a plugin that tells the symfony exception handling mechanism to forward the user to a module/action specified in the configuration files.

In this way, we can keep with us all the benefits of the symfony rendering engine, all it’s helpers, etc.

The handler is made in such a way that we can specify a global default error action, or more detailed per module/action handlers. We can have all this coolness by just typing a few lines in the module.yml file or in the app.yml file :).

If you want to see the details of the usage please check the plugin page on the symfony website.

I’m in Germany at the moment, but I just overheard The Strange Case Of The Missing 8 Black Ball:

Alvaro: “If any of you see a lonely 8 black ball out there. Tell her to go back home, that we need it and we are totally confused because of her absence. Anyway, if you see it somewhere please return it to the pool table.”

Alvaro in reply to himself about three hours later: “Mystery solved, the black ball was trying to commit suicide inside the food fridge!!!!! Pocca found it there and rescued her.The ball alleged that she was depressed because our bad playing… Maybe we should hire a shrink or a coach.”

For one of our projects we have load balanced database servers. We needed to have a way to reflect that in our project code which is written using symfony 1.0. The problem was that symfony 1.0 came by default with Propel 1.2, so our database code was targeted to that version of Propel -version 1.3 supports loadbalancing out of the box-.

For the development environment this represented no problem, but when we faced the deployment to production we needed a way to support loadbalancing with Propel 1.2. After some research we decided to create our own loadbalancer plugin for symfony.

We have been testing it live and is performing good so far.

The good news is that we released the plugin as open source so you can go and get it from the symfony website. There we provided a README with the instructions to set up the plugin.

As for the inner workings of the plugin, what it does is override the symfony default Peer builder to add the loadbalance support. Then the database connection for the slaves are specified in the normal database.yml file, so there is no learning curve on the usage of the plugin.

If you want more details on the implementation just drop a line on the comments and we can write a small tutorial about it.

two events that are actually not connected but by this office.

1. We went to see the James Bond Premier Quantum of Solace on Wednesday in the VIP Room of a cinema. The VIP part was: The most comfortable chairs (more like private couches), soft drinks, popcorn, nachos. As Tom said the theatre itself was so great that he liked the movie before it even started. About the movie: There were no standing ovations, but it was solid entertainment. In my opinion the storytelling should have been sharper and less like a videoclip. Just watch it and make up your mind.

2. besides that inspired by the pirate talk, halloween and flickr I decided to take photos of the office dogs wearing an eyepatch. Django didn’t like it and Bodo had e great time trying new ways to wear an eyepatch.

Judge yourself who’s the better pirate dog: Here we HARRRRR!

As I keep signing up to new services on a regular basis, I’d like to share my opinion with you. This week I tried Kwippy, Pixelpipe and Aviary (on a scale from 1 to 6, 1 is the best, according to German school grades)

Kwippy: 5 Like Twitter and Identica. It gets your Gtalk and Yahoo messenger status and let’s people comment on them. You can also share bookmarks and write short posts. Nothing new and for me it’s pretty useless. I’ll delete my account there now.

Pixelpipe: 2 Yeah I like that. Works great as far as I’ve tested it. Still there is space for improvement. The uploader I used was not so cool and not suitable for larger amounts of photos but maybe they provide something like that. I’d like to pic photos and then pick where to post them with checkboxes. You can change that but it’s not as easy as it should be, especially as I post different stuff on flickr and on twitter. Still a useful tool, cause you can see what you’ve already uploaded. Go ahead guys. It’s a great start and I’m curious where this projects goes. My last post was a pixlepipe test upload.

Aviary: 1 Pretty cool online photoshop, where you can collabotare with others upload, change, view sources and so on. Looks like a lot of fun, if you manage to get really into it. This might take some time because it’s complex but on the other hand that’s what makes it so interesting. I hope I will have the time to play around with this.

red lantern in Longshen

Posted via Pixelpipe.

You managed to have the same Username everywhere?

Cool, than you did a much better job than me. I ended up with 3 user names. Actually 4 but I guess most of the services I used the 4th for are already dead.

So my first one I use for “serious” services like Xing. It refers to my “offline name” and is always available. But then there are the two other ones which accompany me for most of my “online life”.  It’s “reisesteiss” and HerrBert/ Herr_Bert. For example my private Blog is called reisesteiss.blog.de and my name on the Blog is HerrBert. But HerrBert is pretty often already taken. In these cases I’ll use reisesteiss.

This solution doesn’t make me happy and I envy the people who managed to get a consistent name.

So what are the possible solutions?

Come up with a new name which is totally unique, easy to remember and stick to that one. Ok you might not want to change all the accounts you already have and reconnect with the people, but as I already have several different names one more to which I’ll stick to for hopefully the rest of my life wouldn’t kill me. But how do you find out if your name is unique enough to serve for that purpose? Try usernamecheck.com.

I found this on Techcrunch and in their article it looks like mostly everybody already found their consistent name and use the service to look up where they are already registered. Well it works both ways. So it will hopefully help me to find my unique name too.

Here we go new name: Herr_Berta (my normal username makes it pretty hard to guess that I’m female anyway). Damn. It’s already taken in the following networks: Blogger, Etsy, Gmail, Livejournal, Technorati, Vimeo and Youtube. Hm this won’t work. So I’ll try reisesteiss which should be uncommon enough. Hm I think when it is taken it was me who took it so that’s fine. BUT! is this name easy to remember? “Reise” German for “travel” and “steiss” which is my surname? If I’ll use my real name it would be tinesteiss so I think it will work good enough for me. Still I’m not very happ with the whole thing. Thats why I like flickr. I still have to remember my login, but I can always change my screenname if necessary. I will keep thinking about this problem.

This might not be the place to talk about gadgets you don’t need - let me think about it - no! it’s exactly the right place! Aren’t you totally into gadgets too? You started as a kid, fantasizing about your father having a strawberry favoured tank to pick you up at school (which can fly and be invisible - but you didn’t needed to mention that because that’s standard equipment).

Well here we are 20 years later still getting totally excited about extra features you don’t need to survive or even to live comfortably. Let’s call them the “cherry on top features/ gadgets”. Besides the childhood memories these “cherries” are exactly what you need to be sucessful. You can make people want whatever you have to offer because of the price, the quality or the extra “cherry”. The magic gift of the cherry: It can make you ignore the voice of reason. You could call the “cherry” USP, but that would totally take the fun out of it and make it sound like there is a reason. For the Jetsons generation strawberry flavour (or camouflage pattern for the boys) sometimes is enough.

Here are some examples of what is a cherry to me:

- I’ve already posted a pic of my iPod with the cherry sticker

- Luminodot: I still hope to get it for Christmas, but if not I’ll buy it with the money I’ll get for Christmas. (found on Creativecloseup.com)

- Nohohon by Tomy: I already have 4 of them, but I’ll keep buying these cute moving things as they come in different colours, styles and move differently.

- Motorcycle suit: Do I need to say more?

- Zombie garden sculpture: I might need a garden first.

I’ll stop here. Otherwise I’ll spend the rest of my life with this list…

Unfortunately the “cherries” don’t always keep their promise. My iDog for example made me crazy within one day and had to disappear.

The party is over

You are on Twitter and instead of being productive your time gets consumed by watching others being productive, staying informed and following links? Pretty bad but friendfeed now offers a possibility to make it worse: friendfeed realtime! You could simply sit there and watch friendfeed update itself. I love the tool but I won’t use it.

After all the communication, aggregation, collaboration I’m seriously waiting for the contemplation application.

Writing that I’m off to a 4 day photoshoot holiday in Guilin. I’ll be offline all the time, to see how bad my online addiction already is.